I feel like I could go back there for days on end
We’ve now left Sarajevo and reached Mostar, a smaller city in Hezergovina — absolutely beautiful, and absolutely chock full of tourist traps.
As I mentioned in a previous post, we’ve been having very few “traditional” classes; most of our class time is spent out of the university paying visits to politicians and religious figures, or visiting important sites. Beyond visiting Srebrenica and the Tunnel, we’ve now paid visits to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the American Embassy, a couple of the many cemeteries around the city, the Springs of Bosnia, the Cardinal of Bosnia, and the Office of the High Representative, to name a few. Therefore, picking just one favorite is too hard, so I’ll pick two.
The first one has to be Srebrenica. We first went into the warehouse that had been used as the UN “safe area”; thousands of people had been brought in seeking refuge; thousands were subsequently expelled from the building into the hands of the Serbian forces; thousands more were denied even initial entry. Documentary photos showed the items that victims had on their person, laid out on a steel table like evidence. There were biographies of victims — some whose remains had been found, some who are still missing. In one account of a survivor, he said that as they were lined up, they were denied food and water as they sat there waiting to be executed. “I was led out and saw that they were lining up all the men. I needed water and asked the soldiers for some. I was sad at the thought that I would die thirsty.”
We then visited the graveyard of the victims. Most tombstones were white and made of marble; some had flowers laid on them. Some were green temporary plaques, for the newly found remains that were just buried, awaiting their proper stone. There was a wall of names and years of birth, similar to the Vietnam War memorial in DC; it was hard to fathom the thousands of names listed on it. Some names had the year 1980 listed next to them — they were only 15 when they were rounded up and massacred.
That was an extremely sobering visit, especially since we visited the day after the 20th anniversary was remembered. There’s just something about visiting the site of a tragedy like that that can’t be put into words; you can feel its intensity so much more than simply by reading about it.
My second favorite visit (nowhere near as somber as Srebrenica) was Tito’s Bunker, which we stopped at on the drive from Sarajevo to Mostar. It was a project that was kept completely hidden from the public; even the people who worked on it were blindfolded when they were taken there so that they couldn’t see where it was they were working. While it was cool to see the bunker itself, the best part of it for me was the series of art installations that now fill the space. I loved how much variety there was; there were film pieces, photographs, mixed media collages, paintings, drawings, sculptures; you name it, there was an example of it there. Most of them were so strange I had a hard time understanding the message the artist was trying to convey (like a room that had a small couch at one end and a rotating wardrobe at the other), but I enjoyed trying to imagine why the artist chose to make what they did for display there in the bunker. I feel like I could go back there for days on end, puzzling over the strange galleries and trying not to lose myself in the carefully sectioned off areas of the bunker.
